Much Ado About Lists
Making lists is one of the oldest activities of the poet.
–Jorge Luis Borges
What could seem more mundane than a list? Lists of things to-do, errands to run, things to buy, things to pack, grocery lists, wish lists, Christmas lists, resolutions, and questionnaires, to name a few.
But when a writer is able to take this most prosaic of forms, in essence, an organizational tool, and turn it into something inspirational, that is art.
The New York School poets like Ted Berrigan and Joe Brainard became known for making an art form of “list poems,” such as Brainard’s book length poem called I Remember. Any of his memories standing alone would not create a poem or a mood, but collectively they draw the reader into a trance of reminiscence and reflection as they go on for over one hundred pages.
I remember that the red Crayola was always the first to go.
I remember always drawing girls with their hands behind their backs. Or in pockets.
I remember that area of white flesh between the pant cuffs and the socks when old men cross their legs.
I remember daydreams of being a girl and of the beautiful formals I would have.
I remember daydreams of leaving home and getting a job and an apartment of my own.
I remember hating myself after group gatherings for being such a bore.
I remember daydreams of being very charming and witty.
I remember when I was very young thinking that shaving looked pretty dangerous.
–from I Remember
I often stumble across examples in both poetry and prose that show this kind of artful use of lists, litany, repetition and recitation. A good recent example is Eric Puchner’s opening paragraph of his new novel, Dream State. While describing the protagonist’s cabin kitchen he demonstrates the effective use of inventory and repetition as a literary device:
An antique sign—SWEET CHERRIES U-PICK-M—hung on the wall of the narrow kitchen, where every appliance was brown. Brown was the stove. Brown was the refrigerator. Brown, brown were the microwave and dishwasher. Brown was the toaster but rarely its toast, which popped up at random, unforeseeable intervals, like a jack-in-the-box.
–from Dream State
One of my favorite examples is Anne Michaels continual inclusion of litanies of objects within her very poetic novel, The Winter Vault.
At the market, Jean had found a wooden box – once, it had contained three cakes of Yardley soap – that now held an assortment of humble treasures that could only have belonged to a child: glass marbles, an acorn, a feather, a length of twine with a bead knotted at one end, a silver belt buckle, a penknife, some polished stones, playing cards, a key. She could not bear to leave the little box of possessions behind in the rubble of the market, so she bought it.
–from The Winter Vault
Nursery rhymes rely heavily on this device, and it is at the root of how we learn language—our ABC’s came to many of us through a simple rhythmic song.
We often use lists and this kind of cadenced repetition when we teach, comfort and amuse children—from the simple classic Goodnight Moon which catalogs the items in a child’s room to the new delightful A Sleuth of Bears that presents collective nouns in a rhyming list.
A bed of sloths keep cozy and warm
While a band of gorillas play in a storm.
A bloat of hippos gather around
And a shiver of sharks don’t make a sound.
And a sleuth of bears try to figure it out.
-Colter Jackson
Rhythm and music itself is based upon recurring structures, and soon our bodies become involved as our ear picks up on the cadence and pattern of sound. Before we know it we are dancing as well as listening and looking!
Many of nature’s sounds—bird trill, crickets, peepers, bull frogs, and countless others—are rooted in repetitive sound that turns into a pattern of beauty.
Much design, whether man-made or from nature, has its roots in repetitive images—something that notable designers like William Morris during the late Nineteenth-century Arts & Crafts movement, and earlier mosaicists masterfully executed.
Something beautiful is formed through the recitation of words and phrases as well. The best writers are keenly aware of this and some have made a true art of it throughout their work. For instance in Jane Kenyon’s elegiac poem, Let Evening Come, she creates a soft, lovely mood of evening with this litany of everyday occurrences.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
-Jane Kenyon
Joy Harjo is another poet who uses lists and repetition of phrase to create powerful imagery, as in this excerpt from She Had Some Horses:
She had some horses.
She had horses who danced in their mothers’ arms.
She had horses who thought they were the sun and their bodies shone and burned like stars.
She had horses who waltzed nightly on the moon.
She had horses who were much too shy, and kept quiet in stalls of their own making.
She had some horses…
-Joy Harjo
Humor is always a welcome component of literature and Nick Hornby deftly incorporates lists throughout his novel High Fidelity in the amusing voice of his protaganist, Rob Fleming, an English record store owner who obsessively makes lists as a way of coping with his life. Rob’s lists range from music and movies to more far flung catalogs of dream jobs and things he misses about his ex-girlfriend. The comic tone makes the book highly readable and entertaining.
TOP FIVE THINGS ROB MISSES ABOUT LAURA
1. Her sense of humour
(‘very dry, but it can also be warm and forgiving’)
2. Character (‘loyal and honest’)
3. Her smell and the way she tastes
4. How she walks around
5. The way she rubs her feet together when she can’t get to sleep…
–Nick Hornby, High Fidelity
From Browning’s How Do I Love Thee Let Me Count The Ways, to Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham, we see artists transforming the mundane into the beautiful or memorable in a way that resonates with our own inner tendency toward pattern and reiteration—something engaging and humorous or inspiring and calming.
I never tire of May Sarton’s simple litany of the delights of the poet, from her Journal of a Solitude; nor, by contrast, Elizabeth Bishop’s list of losses with the repetitive, mocking phrase, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” in the beautifully devastating villanelle entitled One Art. The villanelle is a complex, musical 19th century French form built upon recurring tercets, as seen in this excerpt:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
-Elizabeth Bishop, One Art
Sometimes we use lists to cope with difficulty or change, or when we are simply overwhelmed by things to do.
Literature becomes important to us in those moments as we allow artists to inspire us with beauty, to make us pause for a moment to think or laugh, and to accompany us along the way from the mundane or burdensome to the sublime.
Happy Reading!
